First off, I have to give a shout out to kornelix, sole developer of the fantastic image editing program fotoxx and other projects. Not only has he developed a light weight, easy to use and amazingly powerful photo editing application, but he's incredibly easy to get a hold of for bug reports and feature requests. And even faster at implementing those changes.
I've been using fotoxx to edit the hundreds of pictures I took on my fantastic backpacking trip through Germany last month. It's hands down, the best photo editing program I've ever used. While Photoshop and GIMP are more powerful, fotoxx is infinitely easier to use and unless you edit photos for a living, it has more than enough features for your needs. My favorite so far, has been Panorama. You can take a series of pictures of a landscape and as long as they have some degree of overlap, fotoxx can stitch them together seamlessly. (For Best Results: try not to have people, water or other things that move a lot between shots). Check out the view from Castle Rheinfels in St. Goar:

A few days ago I noticed a recent change, fotoxx 8.3 was released. Along with it came bug fixes and feature requests I had sent in an email to kornelix on August 28th. Version 8.3 came out Sept 1st, 4 days after I made a request for separate Save and Save As buttons, keyboard shortcuts and a fix for a bug that distorted images when they were rotated! They're pretty minor things, but to have a new version 4 days later is impressive. Thank you kornelix.